Architecture

require APPPATH.'../vendor/autoload.php'; One line in bootstrap.php. This month it became the whole strategy for a project we decided to keep on Kohana. The framework is quiet, the project is alive. These two facts have to coexist somehow. The plan: nothing new gets written the Kohana way. New dependencies come through Composer, and Kohana’s autoloader and Composer’s autoloader live together fine. First candidate was the HTTP client. We talk to two external APIs, and the code around Request_Client_External was not pretty. Guzzle is better in every way. But Guzzle does not spread through the codebase. There is an interface: ...

One AppBundle. That is the line in the official Symfony Best Practices book I read twice. For years the answer to “how many bundles” was “as many as you have features”, and here the framework’s own book says: one. The book came out this autumn. Worth reading even if you are not on Symfony, because the interesting part is the change of tone. The old Symfony way: everything is a bundle. Your application is bundles, reusable, configurable, with their own extensions and semantic configuration. Very flexible. And for a normal business application, mostly ceremony. You write a configuration class for code that will never leave this one project. I wrote such classes. Three of them. None was ever reused. ...

120 lines in one action. Order confirmation: load the order, charge the card, send the email, render the page. It ran fine for a year. Then a console script needed the same operation, and the action turned out to be glued to SMTP, to the database and to the HTTP request. All at once. Symfony people talk about dependency injection so much it sounds like religion. It is one simple idea: a class receives its dependencies and does not create them. ...

Request::factory('widgets/stats') inside a controller. A colleague looked at this line last week and asked the question I hear most often about Kohana: you already have a request, why make another one? I keep answering it at the desk. So I will write it down once. Short notes, mostly backend, mostly PHP. This is the first. The answer is composition. Take a dashboard. A stats block, a recent orders block, a notifications block. Each one needs its own data and its own logic. You can put all of it into one action. It works. In a month it is 300 lines and nobody wants to open it. ...